Four SIGNs of Strength

You are really the best person who knows yourself well enough to identify your strengths and talents. That’s why strength finder assessments are all self-assessed.

However, often we don’t identify our strengths because they are innate we take them for granted. They are skills and abilities that come so easy for us, we assume everybody is good at that strength. So we often need a little help at identifying our strengths. Here is a tool to help you.

“Your strengths have an I-can’t-help-but quality to them. You can’t quite articulate why, but you find yourself drawn to certain activities repeatedly. Even though you may be just a little scared to do them, just a little nervous —‘Maybe I’m not good enough, maybe I’ll fail’—you nonetheless feel a pull toward them.”
—Marcus Buckingham, Go Put Your Strengths to Work

Buckingham identifies four key SIGNs of a strength:

S = Success. You succeed at activities in which you’re strong.
I = Instinct. You instinctively know how to accomplish a task.
G = Growth. You grow each time you perform a strength.
N = Need. You feel a need to be involved in an activity.

Clarify and confirm your strengths by examining the conditions that make an activity particularly engaging:

1. Does it matter why I’m doing this?
2. Does it matter for whom I do this?
3. Does it matter when I do this?
4. Does it matter what this activity entails?

Perhaps public speaking is one of your strengths—but only when it involves large groups, on a topic you know well, with the goal of closing a sale or entertaining your audience.

Once you clearly identify your strengths, you’ll be better equipped to design the work you love and set the stage for excellence, greater satisfaction and happiness. If, however, you’re struggling to understand your strengths, work with a coach experienced in working with the strengths assessment to help you maximize your strengths and better leverage them.

You can’t always dictate your tasks at work, but you can help design your job to include your strengths. That is, if you first have a clear sense of what they are.

Please contact me if you are interested in the strengths assessment and experiencing greater success using your strengths.